Almost 20 years ago, I got a chance to go back to Germany. I hadn’t been there for 25 years prior, and now that the Iron Curtain was down, I planned to go into the former DDR… i.e. Communist East Germany. I had been there once before, in 1979, when the Army let me go to Berlin for a week. During that visit, a group of us spent one day in East Berlin, a so-called “show city” of the Communist world. There was one thing that really stood out in that visit…
… nobody smiled.
I was struck by the fact that, in department stores and shops, the people working there didn’t smile, even when helping you.
Fast forward to 2005. During my visit to castle ruins in the former East Germany, I ran into a couple from Berlin. They seemed cheerful and relaxed, and I asked them about this lack of “lächeln”.. i.e. smiles I saw many years ago among people there. They stated that more and more people were now smiling in Berlin.
And now fast forward to the United States at the end of 2024. My wife and I have both noticed an increasing lack of humor and smiles coming from people as we go out and about. This is especially pronounced in places like malls, as we see more people angry, ill-tempered, and just plain ornery.
Back in the 1960s, there was an excellent comedy show called Get Smart, a spoof on secret agent shows and stories pitting the good guys of Control against the evil forces of Kaos. In one episode, called “The Girls of Kaos,” Control tries to identify Kaos agents taking part in a beauty contest. One, Miss Formosa (i.e. Taiwan) slips through the cracks, and Maxwell Smart asks the Chief of Control how the computer doing facial recognition missed her. The Chief pulls out four photos, all of Asian girls, shows them to Smart and then says that the computer is “only human,” and thus failed to pick up the Kaos agent. The play on words is that Asians all look alike to Americans.
While Mel Brooks is best known for creating irreverent movies like Blazing Saddles, he also created Get Smart (along with the late Buck Henry). A few years ago, Brooks bemoaned the fact that some of his movies couldn’t be made today because of the need to be politically correct.[1] But shows like Get Smart couldn’t be made, either, as there are many episodes that make fun of racial stereotypes from all sides. For example, there was another episode in which a Chinese Kaos agent, when asked why he didn’t recognize Maxwell Smart, remarked that “you Americans all look alike.”
What politically correctness and cancel culture has done is not only destroy comedy. It has also destroyed are ability to smile and laugh at our own foibles. It is not only destroying humor in the arts, it is destroying humor in day-to-day life, as we become more afraid of offending somebody.
Soon enough, we will all be walking the streets without smiling, living in our own version of Communist East Berlin.
Russ Rodgers has several books published on Amazon.
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[1] https://ew.com/movies/2017/09/22/mel-brooks-blazing-saddles-wouldnt-exist-today/